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Sun, 13 Feb 2005

Evolution is history

This has been doing the rounds for a while now, but I figure it's worth dragging up again just in case you missed it: Carl Woese's theory that evolution (Darwinian evolution, that is) is just a passing fad -- a side-effect of the formation of the first cells, about three and a half to four gigayears ago. Here we have Freeman Dyson discussing it, and pointing out that the Darwinian interlude can loosely be considered to be coming to an end.

We humans are a substrate for memes; the self-propagating unit of cultural evolution, intermediated and transcribed from brain to brain by the human language faculty. Memes don't obey strict Darwinism, because we can selectively acquire advantageous memes -- in this respect, they follow a Lamarckian evolutionary model. (Lamarckism has been pretty much debunked in terms of applicability to the DNA/RNA world, but is a good match for the acquisition of useful ideas.)

Despite this, prior to the evolution of language we, well, we evolved via the straight Darwinian shtick. Survival of the viable get from a random sprinkling of unhappy mutants. Rinse, cycle, repeat across a million generations from pond scum to pithecanthropus.

Now it looks like some folks are working on new replicator realms (ProtoLife's proposed system doesn't use DNA or RNA) or just building an organism with a minimal genome.

Looking at it from a distance, if either of those ventures are successful (and there are others out there, working on rather different projects) we'll be able to point to them as marking yet more phase-changes in the prevailing mode of evolution.

And I am left scratching my head and asking, how in hell are the young-earth creationists and the "creation scientists" going to handle that? (Other, of course, than by denying that anything's happening at all -- "it's a fraud" is the last defense of the over-exposed ideology.)

You've been trapped by last year's selfish memes. How are you going to survive in the new ecosystem?

[Link] [Discuss strange wildlife]



posted at: 21:48 | path: /weird | permanent link to this entry

specials:

Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex


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